RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Collicular circuits for flexible sensorimotor routing
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 245613
DO 10.1101/245613
A1 Chunyu A. Duan
A1 Marino Pagan
A1 Alex T. Piet
A1 Charles D. Kopec
A1 Athena Akrami
A1 Alexander J. Riordan
A1 Jeffrey C. Erlich
A1 Carlos D. Brody
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/01/09/245613.abstract
AB Flexible and fast sensorimotor routing, based on relevant environmental context, is a central component of executive control, with prefrontal cortex (PFC) thought of as playing a critical role and the midbrain superior colliculus (SC) more traditionally viewed as the output of cortical flexible routing. Here, using a rat task in which subjects switch rapidly between task contexts that demand changes in sensorimotor mappings, we report that silencing of the SC during a delay period, during which task context is encoded in SC activity, impaired choice accuracy. But inactivations during the subsequent choice period, during which the subject selects their motor response, did not. Furthermore, a defined subset of SC neurons encoded task context more strongly than PFC neurons, and encoded the subject’s motor output choice faster than PFC neurons or other SC neurons. These data suggest cognitive and decision-making roles for the SC. We used computational methods to identify different SC circuit architectures that could account for these results. We found numerous, highly varied SC model circuits that matched our experimental data, including circuits without inhibitory connections between units representing opposite decision outputs. But all successful model circuits had inhibitory connections between units on the same side of the brain representing opposite contexts. This anatomical feature appears to be a key experimental prediction for models in which the SC plays a decision-making role during executive control.